Converged and Hyper Converged Infrastructure

When VMware released vSphere 6.x they introduced 3 new VAAI claim rules that can be utilized with the VMAX and VMAX3. By setting these values you can change the max transfer size up to a maximum 240MB. A white paper released by dellEMC goes into the technology if far more detail than this post. Page 29 of the attached link if you are interested.

What I am more concerned about is setting these values across all my VMware hosts without having to enable ssh, then ssh to each host and run the same esxcli commands on each host and disabling ssh. Also, I would like to be able to set it on all future host will very little effort. In order to achieve that, I want to use PowerCli as much a possible. I’m going to convert esxcli commands into a syntax that PowerCli understands and run them against all the host in my vCenter Instance.

First of all, let’s look at the current configuration so we know where we are starting from. I have highlighted the settings in question. You can see the three new values that were introduced in 6.x. All current values are set to Zero or False by default.

XCOPYUseArrayReportedValues

XCOPYUseMultipleSegments

XCOPYMaxTransferSize

Let’s look at the commands that are suggested by the whitepaper and break them down a little so we fully understand what we are setting.

Now that we understand what we are setting let’s go figure out how to complete the task in PowerCli. Note: I have added a commented out line which lists the command syntax. So you can reference the syntax and the command with the options enabled side by side which hopefully will add some clarity.